Finding Adam
by The Assassin's Pen
Summary: "Malik swallowed thickly, her heart beating painfully as she tried to get to the last place Adam had been seen. In all the chaos of trying to contain the explosion's damage and the ensuing panic the security chief had been forgotten." Malik finds Adam after Namir leaves him for dead. One shot, M for graphic injury.


One of the conversation paths in Human Revolution reveals that Malik was the one, or one of the ones, who found Adam after the terrorist attack. I couldn't help writing my version of what that terrible moment looked like. Serious gore warning here folks-the M rating is appropriate I promise you.

* * *

Smoke clogged most hallways and fire damage licked out from the blast's center in blackened strips that turned to warped panels and charred furniture the closer she got. Malik swallowed thickly, her heart beating painfully as she tried to get to the last place Adam had been seen. In all the chaos of trying to contain the explosion's damage and the ensuing panic the security chief had been forgotten.

Malik rounded a corner, the heat flaring as she backpedaled from a couch that was still burning, taking a moment to blink some of the sting away. Pritchard said Jensen had rushed to the center of the commotion, and no one had seen him since. Malik wasn't part of official evacuation staff, so she'd broken away from the mass and headed into the belly of the beast, desperately hoping to run into Adam and have him scold her for doing exactly what he'd done without a second thought.

"That's my job," he'd say. "I'm the security head, I'm supposed to keep this from falling on everyone else. You're the pilot, you should be ready to get Sarif out of here."

Funny thing, she thought sickly. Sarif was the one who'd grabbed her hand as she'd rushed past him to try and get information. He'd snagged her, uncharacteristic panic in his eyes, and uttered one word. "Adam."

Her breath had gone in an instant and she'd sprinted away, following the path of running people until the smoke and eventually…oh heaven, bullet holes, guided her. This no longer felt like an accident. That's what everyone had been saying, but as the spray damage from Adam's assault rifle grew more frequent Malik knew someone had done this on purpose.

She came up on a collapsed part of the building and she reached out a hand, tentatively pressing. She pulled it back, hissing sharply. The surface was unbearably hot. Behind it the main fire from the explosion must still be raging, and a glance up at the smoke streaming through the cracks confirmed. She followed the line of the wall, picking her way through the damage, about ready to give up hope when glass crunched under her boots and a body hazed into view.

She sprinted back to the closest comm checkpoint and slapped a palm against the button. "Pritchard I found him, he's in the West side of Megan's office, send medics immediately!" she said, ending the com with a hasty click and running towards him.

She leapt the broken teeth left by the shattered wall and dropped, skidding to her knees. "Adam?" she said, breathless, one hand covering her mouth as she tried to process what she was seeing as her friend. He'd been shredded. He was lying prone in a congealing puddle of his own fluids, glass embedded the entire length of his left arm. It glittered harshly in the light of flickering lights and dying fires. The smell of cooked meat and blood burnt by electrical fires long extinguished made Malik too sick to control. She backpedaled, vomiting into a pile of broken equipment, turning back to Adam and wiping a shaking arm across her lips as she tried to remember her training. Tears pooled in her eyes and she barely registered them.

Slowly, she returned to Adam and dared to touch him, placing shaking fingers against the side of his throat. She couldn't tell what she was feeling, if she was feeling anything but her own racing adrenaline. His skin was slick with blood. Slowly, she ran her hands across his back, feeling for damage or misalignment in his spine. If he was still alive— _please please be alive_ —she didn't want to be responsible for paralyzing him. Being paralyzed was no longer a life sentence, especially not with a Sarif health plan, but hurting him in that way was unthinkable. When she pressed into the middle of his back a little too hard his side sunk sickeningly and she jerked her hand.

"Adam please," she pleaded, swallowing as she tried to figure out where she could touch him to roll him over that she wouldn't make things infinitely worse. "I'm so sorry," she whispered, clenching her jaw in sympathy as she settled her hands between the shards in his arm and pulled, easing him onto his side and then his back. She had to sit back and compose herself again, because his back was in perfect condition compared with the rest of him.

He was dead. He had to be. She blinked away tears and covered her mouth again, smelling Adam's blood on her fingers as she tried to get her sobs under control. There was no longer any doubt that this had been an intentional attack, because a bullet hole was oozing blood from the top right of her best friend's skull. She wanted to look away, to get away from him, but she couldn't move any more than she could stop her eyes from taking in every inch of damage. Adam had been destroyed. She stared at the shredded remains of his body armor, realizing with a dizzying jolt that some of the wet she could see through the fabric wasn't blood. It was unstrung abdominal muscle and intestine. Higher up his chest sunk oddly, as though someone had hit him so hard that they'd broken an entire section of his ribs away, leaving the bone and split sternum to sink into the organs they were supposed to protect.

Malik wanted to get up and walk away, but she didn't trust herself to stand, so she just sat back on her heels, hunched her back, and cried. The grief pulled her in until she crumpled under it, startling suddenly when her hand landed on his arm. Blood oozed up between her fingers and trickled slowly across her skin, she sucked several ragged breaths, reaching up to brush a thumb across Adam's jaw, one of the few places on his body that wasn't broken beyond recognition. Shakily, knowing she'd never be able to do this later, she bent in and kissed his forehead, her brow twisting painfully as she felt blood beneath her lips where it still streamed from the bullet wound.

She pulled away and forced herself to get up, looking for anything she could use to cover him. Distantly she remembered Megan kept a blanket in her office for nights when she chose not to go home, and Malik went looking for it. It was half charred, but the quilt was still useable and Malik carried the bundle of it back to Adam with solemn, numb steps.

Kneeling again, she lay the blanket on top of him, hesitating before she pulled it up over his chest. Just as she was about to cover his head, something odd caught her attention and she frowned, leaning a little closer. The blood was still coming from the bullet wound, something that she just now registered as wrong. When Adam had been face down gravity would have caused the wound to keep bleeding, but now that he was on his back it should have stopped. Instead, a slow stream was flowing…no, _pulsing_ down his temple.

Dead men didn't bleed.

Malik sucked a sharp breath and pressed her fingers into Adam's throat, her chest aching and eyes wide. It was weak. It was barely there. His skin was cooling and he had a bullet in his brain, _but he was alive_. Adrenaline destroyed Malik's numb state and set her entire body buzzing and suddenly she was scrambling to strip off her flight suit, thinking only of covering Adam's abdominal wound to protect his organs and stem the bleeding. Whatever he had left he needed to keep.

She felt along Adam's hip until she found his knife and pulled it free, using it to cut the top half of her flight suit away. That done, she grabbed the somehow intact vial of purified water from the eye cleansing station in the relatively undamaged side of the office and doused Adam's abdomen with it, washing away blood and making the exposed tissue gleam macabre and red. She wadded up the cleanest part of her flight suit and doused it in disinfectant and water, covering Adam's abdomen and thanking God that she couldn't smell anything rotten. That meant Adam's intestines were exposed, but not punctured.

Next she went to his head and stripped away another piece of her flight suit, wrapping it around and around to try and stem the bleeding from the bullet wound. She didn't dare try to wash away the blood or pick the glass from his cheek, not with his brain exposed like it was. All she could do was prevent more debris from entering the wound and hope that more than his basic nerve systems were still firing. The thought of losing Adam after he'd survived all of this was crushing. She took the blanket that was almost his burial shroud and covered him with it, trying to preserve any heat he had left.

Knowing Pritchard would have sent help the second he could and unwilling to leave Adam to make sure, Malik sat next to him and took his left hand in hers, pulling shards of glass free so she could do so without making the injury worse. Two of his fingers hung limp and she could feel the severed ends of the tendons underneath his skin. Knowing she'd done all she could for him left her cold and allowed her fear and grief to return, so she sat with him and swallowed back her tears, letting them stream down her face as she sniffed quietly. Her undershirt and the biking shorts she wore under her flight suit were both smeared with blood, causing the fabric to cling chillingly to her chest and thighs. She shuddered a little and wanted to card her fingers through his hair, anything to let him know he wasn't alone. Holding his damaged hand didn't feel like near enough.

"I'm so sorry this happened," she whispered, but any other words died. She didn't know what to say, couldn't process fully what had happened. She just stared into his slack, bloodied face until running feet and a rough voice calling her name snapped her to attention. It occurred in the back of her mind that she was probably in shock, and it wasn't until someone gripped her shoulders firmly that she realized she'd actually been muttering a desperate mantra ever since she'd thought she'd fallen silent.

 _Please don't die please don't die please don't die._

"Faridah, are you hurt?" She blinked, finally understanding that she was being talked to and who was talking to her.

"David?" she said faintly, looking over at Adam who was being swarmed by three medics. She looked back at her boss, brow furrowed. "Why are you here?"

"Everyone else is out, you didn't come back and—" he glanced over at Adam and for the first time in her life she saw fear in David's eyes.

"He's alive," she said, unable to muster emotion. "I think, David—" she gasped suddenly, the urgency of what she'd discovered rushing to the front of her mind. She gripped David's biceps hard, staring into his eyes with a disjointed fervor. "David someone did this on purpose!"

Sarif nodded, looking away as though trying to hide his face. "I know, Faridah. I saw the bullet holes." He turned his head to stare at Adam, and Malik could feel him tremble. "Hole," he amended softly.

"How could someone do this?" Malik asked aloud, tears clogging her voice. She stared at David as though he had the answer, but he just shook his head sadly.

Malik had been checked over and distantly she heard the medic confirm that she was in shock. She'd been sent home, and for twelve hours she wandered around her apartment in a daze, her thoughts constantly tripping back to the memory that her best friend was a bloodied mess, her boss was in hiding, her workplace destroyed intentionally, and her other best friend was dead. The only thing that had saved Adam from suffering the same fate as Megan was the dividing wall that had collapsed during the blast.

Fifteen hours later found her at the hidden facility where David was being kept under watch and Adam was being worked on. She'd gotten the call from his private line that Adam was out of surgery and she rushed to see him, wanted to hear in person what was left.

When she'd been cleared by the four layers of security and finally entered the medical suite, sterilized and exhausted, she paused at the window, the sight of Adam wrapped in bandages and tubes almost more difficult than finding him at the lab had been. Black metal glistened between strips of gauze and Malik wondered what Adam would do if he knew what they were slowly building for him to occupy.

David was standing by the window and turned quickly when she approached, though not before ducking his head away and making an odd gesture that Malik didn't quite understand until she saw her boss' face. David had been wiping away _tears_.

He cleared his throat, giving her a tired smile and she could tell that David hadn't slept since the attack. "His brain is intact—or at least the important parts are. He retains vital control and the parts responsible for memory and personality are alive and active. He's in a coma right now, partially induced, but when he wakes up the Adam we know should still be intact. Some of his motor centers and skills will have to be re-honed, but nothing vital was destroyed by the bullet." He paused, studying Faridah's face and she knew he could see that she hadn't really slept either. "I'm sorry to pull you from your rest, but I thought you'd want to see him—hear the news in person."

Malik nodded, hugging herself and turning to the window, staring at the unfamiliar planes of Adam's damaged body. "No, thank you David. I did want to know." She swallowed, eyes lingering on the neat, white covering hiding the shredded part of his torso. "What—" she took a steadying breath and cleared her throat. "What about the rest…?"

David seemed to relax a bit as he relayed mechanical information, though his weariness still bled into his voice. "His chest wall was broken—we had to re-build and replace most of his chest cavity. His lungs needed strengthening and his heart was bruised, but that will heal on its own. Right now it's beating well so we left it alone. Augmentations for the heart are limited as is, so we just installed a standard cardioverter—should help in case…" he trailed off and Malik couldn't help but notice how David's voice weakened slightly. He straightened his back and crossed his arms, staring into Adam's room as he continued. "His abdomen was damaged pretty severely but they were able to stitch everything back together so with therapy his muscles will heal. Thanks to your quick thinking his intestines weren't damaged and there was very little debris to remove so infection won't be an issue. His arms—" he bowed his head. "Well you can see. We put a titanium patch in his skull since there was no recovering the fragments, it's bonding well so far."

"You did what you had to," Malik said softly, daring to rest a hand on David's shoulder. She and her boss had never been close, but she knew he cared about Adam and after what had happened professional boundaries between them seemed inconsequential. They were the only ones who'd been close to Adam and seen what was left of him after the attack. They were the only ones who could stand silent before the glass and still say everything everyone else wouldn't understand.

"We're going to find them, Faridah," David said, an angry flint in his voice. His eyes were hard and Malik could feel the hardness of tensed muscle under her hand. "We're going to find every single one of them."


End file.
